About Me

For those of you who don’t know me personally, my name’s Prateek Viswanathan, though I go by Neil (my middle name) fairly often. I respond to both names though. Concerning this blog, I began writing The Bridge over the Abyss at the end of my sophomore year in 2008, and published it via Amazon December 2010. I had always enjoyed writing and reading as a kid, and both of my parents were talented writers who enjoyed reading books and would always leave around new books for me. I had mostly tried my hand at short stories (some complete, some not so much), but one night while discussing with my dad, he suggested that I write a fantasy novel. Logical, given that we had been discussing Eragon prior to that. With that stimulus, I spent a bit of time casting around for ideas, and then with the beginning of the summer of 2006 (I was a rising high school freshman), I began writing. The Bridge over the Abyss has its roots in this earlier novel attempt, tentatively titled Song of the Swords, which featured Raychel the elf as only main character. The plotline involved almost only elves with a few humans, a minor civil war, and a war against Death. I didn’t get very far, and soon school caught up to me and my time. The next two years were spent just letting my imagination go wild and create characters and places, and while it wasn’t being written, I would still discuss this vague story with my family. My brother in particular supplied me with a thief character named Rent, who I rewrote into a young prince. Jack came out of my mental wanderings while in a department store. Scrimm I had come up with soon after stopping the first story, and for a while I struggled to incorporate these characters into the original plot. It soon came to me that instead, I would move the original plot over to this newer world, where its storyline and Raychel were but a smaller (though crucial) part of the The Bridge over the Abyss. I wrote this with a vague idea of maybe getting it published, but the story and creating the story was entertaining enough that I didn’t need that end goal in mind. Two years after it was published (basically now), I began putting this book up a piece at a time in a blog. While this method certainly grants it some more exposure, I wanted to try and express this story not as a novel but as a weekly periodical, which presents its own challenges. In any case, I do hope that you enjoy this blog!

Note to readers: This blog originally was just like the original novel, but in recent posts I have restructured and reordered some posts, and added significant material (not so much plot wise as description wise) to some chapters that were rather too thin for their importance (Chapter 18 is a perfect example.) I suppose it would be far more accurate to call this “The Bridge over the Abyss, Second Edition.”